Hands: palm readers peer into them to divine the future; naturopathic physicians scrutinize them for clues to the health of internal organs; suitors steal glances at them to guess the age of their owners.

For years and years, I've had this idea floating around in the back of my head that it would be interesting to take photos of people's hands. People I know. People I love. People I admire.

But I never got around to it.

Until I met my love, and gave it a 50mm f/1.4 lens as a sign of my deep and abiding affection. Now I'm seeing hands I want to shoot everywhere...

These are my father's hands. We were sitting outside at a cafe in Mill Valley a couple of weeks ago, sipping iced tea on a sunny afternoon. You can see how big his hands are, creased and calloused from years of hefting wood + pruning orchards + remodeling yet another room in the farmhouse.

I'll have more to show you soon.

Oh - and if you and I meet up? for coffee or whatever? - I might ask to take a photo of your hands. Just so you know.

Have you ever found something that, once you found it, you suddenly realized how very much you’d missed it?

That happened to me this summer. It was a tremendous feeling.

First, a little history: though random people at the grocery store often reminded us that we had enough kids to make up a basketball team (har! har!), my family didn’t actually do organized sports. School was held at the kitchen table, and “p.e. class” consisted of chopping wood or fixing the fence so the sheep wouldn’t escape (again). Soccer? Swim team? When you sew your own clothes and make your own tofu, there’s no time for such nonsense. I occasionally entertained daydreams of spiking a volleyball or kicking the winning goal, but alas: it wasn't meant to be.

At some point during my teens – at 14, maybe 15 – it suddenly occurred to me that while I might never be in any starting lineup, I could put one foot in front of the other like a champ. I began getting up at dawn and running on a dirt track that ran along a ridge near our house. Being out there in the grey morning light, sucking down the cold Oregon air, had a magical effect: it cleared my head and cleansed my spirit, and when I finally tottered back to the house, sweat-slicked and red-faced, I always felt far better than before.

During college, I ran up S.E. Division Street to the reservoir next to Mt. Tabor, counting pine trees with each lap around its wrought-iron border. I still remember the shadows that dappled the surface of the water, the slapping sound of my heels against the ground. When I moved onto the campus at Oregon Health Sciences University, I ran the hills that looped behind and in front of the campus, up and down, over and around. Years later, in San Francisco, I ran through Pacific Heights, up Broadway and down Jackson. I discovered the Lyon Street Steps. I wore out multiple pairs of shoes. I saw many sunrises + sunsets.

I’ve written about my knee injuries here before, so I won’t bother you with them again, but when the first (non-running-related) injury happened in 2002, it scraped a sizable chunk of cartilage off of my kneecap; high-impact sports were officially out.

And so I stopped running. It was the sensible thing to do.

I delved deeper into yoga and took the occasional spin class, but whenever I saw someone’s feet flying by on the sidewalk, I felt a particular twinge. I had another knee injury in 2006, followed by another surgery, and I didn’t even think about running for a very long time.

Until this summer, when I suddenly had to. Had. To.

I pulled on an old pair of shoes and walked outside, and… whoa. Not running for a few years does a number on your pace. Keeping my injuries in mind, I cobbled together a program of power walking-jogging-running that seemed to work; a couple of weeks later, I discovered a formidable set of stairs and added those to the mix.

Re-discovering running was like unearthing a part of me that I had lost; it brought back memories that I thought I had forgotten, sensations I thought might be gone forever. Every time I went out, I thought: I missed this! Oh: how: I missed this.

One of my favorite moments is when, about 15 minutes into a run, I feel the pull of resistance, and the thought crosses my mind: This is hard; I'm tired; I shouldn’t have come out today, but I push through it, and by the end – feet flying, shins aching – it’s like pushing through ticker tape.

It’s not exactly pretty, this jog-walk-step-thang I have going on, but it works. My knees complained during the first few weeks, but now I'm feeling no pain. It clears my head and cleanses my spirit, and when I stumble back home, sweat-slicked and red-faced, I feel so, so, so much better than before.

After a whole week of not blogging, the least I can do is post a photo for Random Photo Friday.

This is one of my sisters, down on the farm, bringing some style to the tractor.

'Cause that's how we roll 'round these parts. Style, substance, and a handful of dirt tossed on in there for good measure.

And now, on this gorgeous September weekend, I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite passages from poet Mary Oliver:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.

- Mary Oliver

Here's to fields, and to strolling, and most of all: to paying attention.

Just a phase she went through, you said to yourself, with a shake of your head.

Didn't 'cha?

But what day is it today? And what do you see here?

Yeah, baby: not one but TWO photos to gently nudge you into your weekend.

That'll learn ya.

This is my mom, holding 3 eggs plucked straight from the nest of hay where they were laid. She sells them by the dozen to a few damn lucky select customers.

"I'm thinking I might have to raise my price," she said to me recently.

"Oh? How much are you charging now?" I asked.

"$2.00 a dozen. But I'm thinking I may have to increase it to $2.25."

TWO DOLLARS A DOZEN? I could practically buy a plane ticket, fetch the eggs, grab a cup of Stumptown on my way out and still come out ahead.

This is one of 4 pigs my parents are raising this year.

They eat zucchini + pea shoots + whatever is left over from the garden. My dad drives to a local upscale market twice a week and picks up all of the past-dated artisan bread and cuts it up in chunks to feed them in the evenings. (Psst, Barbara: perhaps you might entertain the notion of getting a pig? They help nicely with the issue you raised.)

Their date with the butcher arrives next week, and my mother tells me that they've sold all the meat already - I couldn't even bring myself to ask how much they charged.

There are still good deals left in the world. You just might have to head to North Plains, Oregon to find them.

My life is full of small shining moments, glimmering threads sewn into the fabric of each day. They happen all the time: catching sight of a full moon overhead; lingering over tea with friends; sinking into a good book. Alone, they might not seem significant, but together, they provide solid proof of life’s goodness, of the everyday magic that surrounds me.

But there are moments, and there are Moments. Moments when planning + intention + luck slide magically into place and everything is right with the world, if only for a few shimmering seconds. Such are the moments that make up the Highlight Reel.

The Highlight Reel is what I draw from when grim reality begins to cloud my vision, when all I can see is lack and loss. It spins like a slow-moving carousel, filled with slow-mo shots of golden light, triumphant eyes, exultant smiles. It's my happy place.

In July, I had not one but two moments for the Reel.

They both happened on the occasion of my mother’s 60th birthday. Prior to the big day, my sisters and I talked for months about how to commemorate this special occasion. What would bring our mother the most happiness? We gently probed her for suggestions, and came away with a few guidelines: no big party. No la-dee-da.

Finally, we decided upon this: all of us girls, her daughters (there are six of us) would whisk her away to her favorite place, Canon Beach, where we would spend the day. We would also invite her sister, our aunt, to join us. I would fly up from San Francisco; youngest sister would fly up from Austin, baby in tow, and we’d spend the day showering our mother with love. And we wouldn't tell her beforehand; we'd make it a secret.

It wasn’t a showy plan, and there was much debate among us as to whether it was enough, but we stuck to it. Our aunt arranged to spend the day with our mother, thereby guaranteeing that her day would be free. I flew in the night before, as did little sister, whose plane was delayed twice, and who finally straggled into PDX after midnight carrying one exhausted infant.

On the morning of our mother's birthday, we sisters met about a mile from the farm so that we could drive down the hill, caravan-style, for the surprise. Each of us had called her earlier that morning, telling her in our own ways that we wished we could spend the day with her, but that one thing or another had prevented it. “How’s the weather in San Francisco?” she asked me. “Cool and foggy as always,” I replied, looking out on a sunny Portland sky.

I’m sitting at my desk, seven different windows open on my monitor, Petra snoozing on the floor behind me, airplane jut-jut-jutting through the sky overhead.

The phone rings. It’s one of my sisters calling from Portland.

She: I was reading your last blog post, and I... have a question.Me: Sure. What’s on your mind?

She: I’m not sure how to say this, but… I’ve noticed that the way you’ve been writing about the past - you know, on the farm and stuff - has been changing.Me: Oh? How so?

She: Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, but lately it sounds like you’re less… bitter. Not that you were bitter before, exactly. But maybe you’re feeling softer about things? Or more nostalgic or something.Me: Hmm.

She: Does that sound weird? I mean, somehow it just seems different lately, or maybe I’m reading too much into it.Me: Well. I haven’t been aware of a difference, but: sometimes I do feel bitter, absolutely. Other times I feel grateful. And sometimes I feel a sense of tenderness for all the good moments.

She: I see.Me: Sometimes I feel like my spirit is like a kaleidoscope. Depending on which way the light is hitting it and how shaken up it is, it reflects back different feelings. But it’s all there, all the time. Warm fuzzy feelings and the opposite.

She: Yeah, I get that.Me: I guess I’m becoming more comfortable with the idea that I can feel a lot of different ways about something. And that each of those feelings is equally valid.

She: We’ve all dealt with our childhoods in different ways, haven’t we? You work things through by writing about them. I like to talk things through out loud. We’re all trying to make sense of it as best we can.Me: Yeah.

She: Like the more I talk through it, the more I tell my story, the more I feel like I understand it. I kind of have to talk about it. If I kept it inside, I wouldn’t be in a very good place. Maybe that’s how it is for you with the writing.Me: Yeah. That’s exactly it.

She: Okay, that’s all I wanted to say. I have to go back to work now.Me: Okay, me too. Bye.

(I love you, MJ. Hope we keep having these discussions for decades to come. XOX)

After we moved to the farm when I was ten, I felt like my world collapsed inward.

No more going to school - now school was held at the kitchen table, with #2 pencils and textbooks from Alpha & Omega and A Beka. No more piano lessons from the nice lady in the trailer house - now I walked up the road to take piano lessons from the neighbor girl. No more spending the afternoons with friends or going to sleep-over. Now there were diapers to change, diapers to wash. Sticky toddler hands to wipe and cherries to can. Chickens to feed and goats to milk. Zucchini and pole beans to weed and water.

We were only 23 miles from Portland, 4.5 miles from the grocery store, but it seemed to me that we might as well have existed in our own universe.

And then: my father got a job working as a building engineer in downtown Portland. He left before dawn and returned in the early evening, upon which he would change his clothes and head back outside to work in the barn, or add another section of fence, or chop branches for the wood pile.

One Saturday morning, he announced that he was going into his office for a few hours.

"Can I go?" I asked.

He studied me for a moment. "Well," he said, finally. "I suppose you might like to see a bit of Portland."

I was planning to tell you about the July 4th celebrations of my childhood, about how we rose early on those mornings to butcher a dozen or more chickens, strewing the ground between the house and barn with blood and matted white feathers.

I was going to write about how we finally put the last packages of meat into the freezer in the middle of the afternoon, and how afterwards we sat on aluminum folding chairs and ate fat wedges of watermelon, still smelling chicken flesh beneath our fingernails as sticky pink juice dripped from our wrists.

I wanted to tell you about our annual tradition, when twilight began to fall, of doing the Sparkler Dance, and how our father directed us to the front yard and pressed those thin powdery sticks into our hands and egged us on: put your whole self into it! Jen, let’s see a real smile! and watched as we carved shapes into the air, circles and squiggles and question marks, while the sharp, dry grass pricked the undersides of our bare feet.

About the way my adolescent self shrank during those moments, feeling like it was wrong to pretend that we knew how to dance when in fact we looked like the chickens, hours earlier, who ran helter skelter, this way and that, confused.

We traced fizzy blue lines in the night when what we really wanted was to be at the fairgrounds, stuffing our cheeks with greasy popcorn and cotton candy and watching the fireworks light up the sky. And we wished, as the distant popping sounds of the fireworks amplified our seclusion, that we were Normal.

{ that is what I intended to write about }

Then I decided to lock up my keyboard for the weekend and celebrate instead.

On the night of the 4th, as the night echoed with explosions and spark trails etched the sky, I marveled at the fact that here, in this moment so many years later, the Sparkler Dance and the chicken smell are tinged with nostalgia. And I laughed a little bit about the craziness of it all, about the way that sometimes happiness feels like a secret code, impossible to decipher, when it is here, always, mine for the taking.

I thought about how no one, anyone, is Normal.

And how I like it that way, and cherish the opportunity to swap un-Normal stories about muggy summers filled with adolescent angst + discovery + revelation.

I took this picture the day of my Grandma's funeral back in October. We had all spent most of the day crying, and he was wiped out. I sensed how alone he felt, even in a room full of family.

Since then, he's done remarkably well in adjusting to life on his own. He's back to delivering Meals on Wheels to seniors who can't get out on their own, and attending OSU games, and driving all over Oregon to visit family members. He still misses my Grandma terribly - we all do - but he's doing his crossword puzzles and planning a fence to keep the deer out of his yard.

See that checkbook peeking out of his shirt pocket? For as long as I've
known him, my entire life, he has always carried a checkbook there. He
spent the early years of his life in the tiny town of Sweetwater,
Texas, picking watermelons and dreaming of bigger things. His mother
wore a bonnet and smoked a corncob pipe. To this day, he speaks with a
gentle twang and says "y'all."

Last time I saw him was in April, and he asked if I had filed my taxes yet.

"Of course," I replied. "I used TurboTax this year."

"Me too!" he exclaimed. "Isn't it great?"

He sent me a Facebook invitation a few weeks ago. My Grandpa - on Facebook.

I want to be just like him when I'm 84.

People become more precious when you remember that we only have a limited amount of time with each person in our lives.

Here's to savoring the moments we have with the ones we love.

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

Inspiration On the Interwebs

+ I've known about Superhero jewelry forever, but I only stumbled across Andrea's blog a couple of weeks ago. Every entry is soulful and rich, and I always leave feeling expanded.